That's Entertainment!

From games and sports we go to the nebulous "entertainment". The first
thing that's supposedly entertainment is the Club Theater Network,
which has "combined 35mm film, live theater, satellite transmission,
computers, and gourmet dining in one experience." If you have enough
money to assume a ritzy lifestyle but not enough to actually attend
ritzy events, you can drop in one of the "small theaters located in
private country clubs, resort hotels, or high-rise condominium
complexes." After a gourmet meal, you're shuffled off to watch
whatever dreary auction or fashion show is tonight's suppository of
culture.

But wait! It's interactive! "The theater's seats are computerized
so that you can press a button in the armrest and access a hookup to
ask a question, place a bid, or enter a credit-card number." Palm
Beach, you're on the air! This is the lower-upper-class equivalent of
the Interactive Game Network, and it has the same problems on a much
larger scale. If you loved interacting with game shows through an
official channel consisting of a few buttons, you'll love interacting
with high society through the same channel plus a credit card
slot.

Strap yourself into a ball and ride around in a gigantic pinball
machine. Not a game, not a sport, just generic entertainment from
Swiss company Intamin, Inc. Not surprising this didn't catch on,
because it requires a lot more real estate than a regular-sized
pinball machine, and regular-sized pinball machines aren't exactly
cash cows.

Intamin made quite a name for themselves making amusement park
rides, "monorails, and aerial tramways," and they're still at it,
producing roller coasters, "water rides", and "giant wheels" to anyone
willing to meet their (presumably high) price.

Mega Ball is a fun if impractical idea so I'll quote a little more
detail. "You and three friends" are pulled up "a 193 by 76-foot-wide
inclined plane" and then "released to roll down the colorfully painted
platform, bouncing off walls and posts... You can control the giant
flippers from within the ball, through a radio-frequency hookup--but
even more dastardly, a coin-operated pushbutton outside the ride will
allow sadistic spectators to "bump" Mega Ball's hapless riders back up
the platform for another shot!" Average ride time: two minutes.

Oh, the ball isn't really a ball; it's more like a giant hockey
puck or the big inner tube you'd sit in during a
white-water-rapid-themed amusement part ride. I'm not exactly thrilled
with the prospect of subjecting myself to the mercies of "sadistic
bystanders" armed with quarters.

"Mega Ball" is now the name of a special ball in the multi-state
Mega Millions lottery.

Museum exhibit designer (and marrier-into of the Kennedy family) Edwin Schlossberg) has come up
with a "place where people can play with each other through
technology." Sounds like a precursor to the LAN cafes of the 90s,
except Schlossberg also came up with his own games people will play in
these pavillions. "Beat The System," a stock trading game, the "Robot
Cocktail Party", where you control a robot looking for another robot
in a sea of robots, and "Big Picture", which is a lot like The Smaller Picture.

People won't generally play $20 to play (fairly boring) games you
made up. They will gather, and sometimes pay, to play games they
already know about. Thus the LAN cafes, and today's MMORPGs and gaming
communities. Schlossberg is the type to make statements like:
"Technical advancements created situations that isolated people. Now
it's time we create situations where people can learn to interact with
each other." So it's hard to say whether his 1989 incarnation would be
interested or horrified to know that his idea came to fruition as lots
of ways to get people interacting with each other without ever
meeting.

The most recent plane trip I took, the in-flight entertainment system
had just about everything promised in this Future Stuff
entry. "4-inch flat-panel display screen located on each seatback,"
check. "[A]llowing passengers to choose their own entertainment,"
check. "[M]ovies, TV shows, video games," check. "Moving route map,"
sort of check. Truly, it "rival[ed] anything [I] might now have in
[my] home", except in my home I have a decent-sized TV, and the music
and movies I like, rather than whatever the airline has licened for
the current two-week period.

Not check: "live viewing of the landing and takeoff of your plane"
(from what vantage point?), "gate directories, the status of
connecting flights," and the ability to "order food and drink and even
duty-free goods through the system." All of that is still handled
through in-flight magazines and human interaction. There's some
back-end stuff about drink and food inventory management that doesn't
matter much from the end-user perspective so I'll pass lightly over
that.

So the state of the art is pretty good but it took a while to get
there. The first time I saw the newfangled map system was around 1996,
when it was displayed on the same big TV screen used to display
in-flight movie to everyone, whether you liked it or not. Seatback TVs
came along with JetBlue in the early 2000s. Video games are recent,
although there may have been some infuriatingly slow ones in the
90s. This is a pretty good one if you want to tease out all the
possible technology developments that flow from a single idea.

Oh, this was a joint venture of Boeing and Sony, both of whom you
may have heard of.

Glancing over this entry I saw eye-glazing phrases like "70mm at 60
frames per second" and blurbs like "Incomparably more realistic than
anything I've ever seen on a movie screen! -- Roger Ebert" and started
thinking this was a precursor to today's omnipresent digital video. It
sort of is, in that it's a way to shoot high-quality film, but it's
not qualitatively different from film--just a different kind of film
shown at more frames per second.

Like digital video, Showscan requires "a modified projector, a
better sound system, and a larger screen." Unlike digital video, movie
theaters never made the switch. The original ShowScan company went
bankrupt in 2002, but they were bought up
and ShowScan Entertainment is still putting out "simulation ride"
movies like "Haunted Raceway 3D" and "Under The Sea Mission
4D". That's an extra D!

Nice of them to put the motion simulator entry next to Showscan,
because these two technologies ended up together. Remember how I just
said Showscan is mainly used for "simulation ride" movies? Well, the
motion simulator provides the "ride" part. "A Swiss company based in
Maryland"... wait a minute, Intamin from "Mega Ball" was a Swiss
company. Yes! Intamin VP Kurt Lukas is quoted here just as he is in
"Mega Ball". They got the bulk of this chapter by talking to one guy!

Okay, enough of that. Motion simulators are a dime a dozen, but
Intamin's still making them and probably has a nice business in
them. Probably the first motion simulator to make it big was Disney's
Star Tours back in 1987, but those rides were custom-built from
military flight simulators. I'm guessing Haunted Raceway 3D and the
other ShowScan rides are built on top of Intamin's stuff.

Intamin's website offers a "Maxi Motion Seat" with six degrees of
freedom, as well as (unrelated to this entry) a "Multi Media Dark
Ride" vehicle which "can be attractively designed to match the theme
of the story line."

Uh, I didn't actually quote Future Stuff at all but I think
you know what I'm talking about here. This sort of ride is now a minor
part of our culture. Future Stuff gives the impression that a
motion simulator can replace a real roller coaster, and I've not been
on a lot of these simulators but I think there's still a pretty big
difference in experience.

This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Monday, March 31 2008, 00:26:30 Nowhere Standard Time and last built on Sunday, February 18 2018, 04:00:19 Nowhere Standard Time.